Apr 2 Jennifer Gunlock

Based in Long Beach, CA, Jennifer Gunlock is a traveller who imbeds her wanderings into the art making process. With an attraction to crevices, old growth and decay, she photographically collects imagery such as the gnarled oaks and cemetery crypts of New Orleans, lichen-covered slate rock cliffs of Pennsylvania, and the beautifully decaying Beaux-Arts and Art Deco buildings of Los Angeles, to later deconstruct and assign new meaning in the studio.

’’My mixed media drawings demonstrate a fascination with the relationships between things of nature and those of human imposition. With the application of photo transfers, tonal papers, and drawing media onto rag paper or panel, tree-based figures are constructed, whose bodies are awkwardly fused with metal gates, antennas, stone, and other architectural motifs.

Each of these tree-forms is an ancient, sentient thing whose lifespan evokes the rise of fall of civilizations and the forests they occupy. A people enters a forest, clears it, and builds upon it. The village grows into a mighty city, perhaps an empire, and eventually, inevitably, the people abandon its city, and the civilization dies. As their great monuments crumble into ruin, the forest slowly encroaches and reclaims its right for dominance. The ancient trees and ruin bump up and press against each other, causing tension and ultimately fusion. The result is a forest of hybrid beings, comprised of metal, stone and branch.’’